Adult Book of the Month
New Irish Short Stories edited by Joseph
O'Connor
Published by Faber and Faber in 2011
This collection is dedicated to David Marcus who edited
the previous two volumes of Irish short stories from Faber, entitled The
Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2004-05, and The Faber
Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2006-07.
In his introduction, Joseph O’Connor says that he has tried to reflect
something of the variety of Irish writing in his choice of stories for
this compilation. He has placed the works of internationally acclaimed
award-winning authors such as William Trevor and Emma Donoghue alongside
the works of talented new writers such as Belinda McKeon - whose debut
novel will be published this year -and previously unpublished writers
Angela Power and Elaine Walsh. The collection offers stories set in Ireland
written by authors born here and from writers born elsewhere but living
here now. Some deal with the realities of contemporary Ireland while others
are set in an older, more secretive place. Some stories are set among
the Irish abroad and other do not allude to Ireland at all. O’Connor
says that there are no easy laughs in the collection with some dark and
bleak stories but he maintains that, despite the current gloom, “sometimes,
in the Irish sentence, the greatest thing we have ever invented, we glimpse
what we might yet be.. …..I believe that the writing offered here
has something of the clamorous music of Ireland now, the strangeness and
yet the beauty of a country that is passing through adolescence, one glance
on its painful childhood, another on the horizon, poised somewhere between
denial and hope.”
New Irish Short Stories shows the short story
to be a thriving form in Ireland and one that should continue to be celebrated
and encouraged.
